January 29 - Is Ukraine on the Brink of Civil War?; The Egyptian Military's Crackdown on the Press; The Life and Legacy of Pete Seeger and the Hudson River

Full Program

Part 1

We will begin with an update on the crisis in Ukraine following a warning by its first post-independence president Leonid Kravchuk to parliament that the country was on the verge of civil war. Jeffrey Mankoff, the Deputy Director and Fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Russian and Eurasian Program joins us to discuss the struggle within the country between the pro-European majority and the pro-Russia minority, and the wider impasse between Europe and Russia, between democratic values and power politics.

Part 2

Then we examine the assault on press freedom by Egypt’s military government with 20 journalists from Al-Jazeera facing charges of belonging to terrorist groups, harming national unity and social peace and spreading false news. An expert on the Arab media, Marwan Kraidy, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania joins us to discuss the military’s intimidation of the Egyptian press and the role of the chief backers of the military regime, Saudi Arabia in influencing Arab media and spreading the Saudi Royal Family’s model of feudal politics and reactionary religion.

Part 3

Then finally, we speak with John Cronin, the Senior Fellow in Environmental Affairs at the Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies and the founder and CEO of the Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries. The author with Robert Kennedy Jr., of “The Riverkeepers”, he worked for decades with Pete Seeger on cleaning up the Hudson River. He joins us to discuss the life and legacy of Beacon New York’s most famous resident Pete Seeger, who eschewed celebrity and lived by the motto, “think globally but act locally”.